Still a Pistol

"We just let him do what he wants and it seems to work," says the show's producer, Mark Sovel. "It's amazing how many stories he's got, and it's amazing how many involve stealing equipment. He was talking the other day about breaking into Roxy Music's van and taking a gold record and all sorts of stuff, like a fuzz box. A lot of it ended up being used by the Sex Pistols in the studio."

"We expected him to be controversial," Soval adds, "and he turned out to be hilarious and charming."

The Sex Pistols were Steve Jones's idea, and few ideas in the history of rock have rattled the world so hard. Formed in 1975, the band performed for just three years. Its entire reputation flows from a single album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols." But nothing about music was quite the same after Johnny Rotten screamed "No future for you!" at the end of "God Save the Queen." The BBC banned many of the Pistols' singles, and when "Bollocks" went on sale in '77, many of the major chains in England wouldn't carry it. No matter. It was a bestseller, a countercultural shocker, and it popped the rivets right off music for a good long time.

"It was mind-blowing," Jones now says of the experience. "I knew there was something going on, but I had no idea what was going to happen."

How could he? Jones was 19 when the band started, and he swears he'd been playing guitar for just three months before the Sex Pistols' first concert. Before that, as recounted in "England's Dreaming," Jon Savage's richly detailed history of the band, Jones spent much of his time thieving from the homes of rock stars -- a fur coat from Ron Wood's house, a TV and some clothes from Keith Richards's. When Jones needed equipment to start his own band, the pace of the stealing soared. Two guitars were lifted from Rod Stewart's mansion and, in a now-storied burglary, the entire PA system and some top-dollar microphones were quietly escorted out of the Hammersmith Odeon the night before David Bowie was supposed to play a major concert in his Ziggy Stardust days.

With the aid of a clothing-shop owner and media-savvy manager, Malcolm McLaren, Jones assembled the Pistols, with Rotten added after an impromptu audition at a bar with a jukebox. (He sang over Alice Cooper's "Eighteen.") In interviews at the time, the band ranted about bum-rushing the musical establishment, but Jones now says his real motives were more mundane.

"We didn't come along to get rid of anyone. I wanted to be in a band because I didn't like my lifestyle. To me it was a way out. And Cookie [drummer Paul Cook], my closest friend, he wanted to be involved, and Glenn Matlock could play a bit of bass and we needed a singer and John came along. It just happened that we couldn't play very well -- I couldn't, anyway -- so it kind of gave it a unique sound. And John couldn't sing very well and that was it."

The history of the band, which imploded on stage in '78 at a show in San Francisco, has somehow overshadowed the music, even though the music is still as untamed, terrifying and yet easy to whistle as ever. The Sex Pistols are always mentioned in any list of rock's most essential bands, but the group is almost never heard on the radio and, amazingly, has yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"I don't care less, to be honest with you," Jones says about all this. "It's not every day you get to create a band like the Sex Pistols, and what it changed, on a musical level. I love that we've done something that was important."

Important and perpetually discovered by a new, if modest-size, audience. "Bollocks" remains a slow and steady seller, yielding a slow and steady stream of income.

"We do all right now," Jones says of the money he and his former band mates make from their music. "Unfortunately, the catalogue ain't that big. If we'd had the same amount of albums as the Clash, we'd be laughing. But we only have one proper album."

Listening to Jones for two hours is a reminder of how stale and gutless radio is these days, and it's enough to make you wonder who is behind the station. Here's the weird part: All the advertising is sold by none other than Clear Channel, the San Antonio-based radio conglomerate known mostly for stale and gutless programming. But Clear Channel doesn't pick the music on Indie 103.1. That job falls to a multimedia company called Entravision Communications, which makes most of its money through Spanish-language radio and TV stations.

Bedfellows don't get much stranger: radio's great Satan, a Hispanic corporation and a Sex Pistol. But the trio has undeniable chemistry, mostly because the corporate overlords in this relationship did what they are otherwise reluctant to do: allow some eccentricity on the airwaves. How eccentric? Well, here's what an hour of Jones's company sounded like last week.

He opened with a meditation about the weather, which somehow led to a meditation about jet lag. Which got him thinking about boats.